Ty Harris finished responding to her question and the room got silent again, waiting for the next reporter to pop up and lob a question in the postgame press conference.

The microphone got moved around the room and a reporter got the chance to ask, “Ty, I know you guys are number one. Do you feel like you’re the best team in the country?”

Harris smiled, let out an “um,” before pausing and answering.

“I feel like we’re up there,” she said. “Obviously we haven’t played the other top two teams. We haven’t played Oregon or anything, but I feel like we’re great contenders for the Final Four.”

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Harris can be shy about it, but her play and the Gamecocks’ performance in a dominating win over UConn Monday showed the college basketball world that South Carolina is undoubtedly the best team in the country.

The Gamecocks routed UConn, ending the game up 18, but having their lead creep all the way up to 21 points early in the second half.

The win marks South Carolina’s 17th-straight win and eighth over a team currently ranked in the AP Top 25. Of those eight wins, four have come against top 10 teams with two against top five teams. Connecticut was No. 5 entering Monday’s matchup.

Led by Harris’s team-high 19 points, South Carolina never trailed, dispatching another top five team as the Gamecocks continue their march towards the top overall seed in the tournament and the Final Four in New Orleans.

“A lot of people have us as the number one team in the country,” Dawn Staley said. “What we can do is continue to win. That’s how you get your questions answered.”

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They gave up just two points in the first quarter, and held the Huskies to just 36.1 percent shooting while forcing 15 turnovers and blocking seven shots.

Four different players—Harris, Aliyah Boston, Mikiah Herbert-Harrigan and Zia Cooke—all finished with at least 10 points with three other Gamecocks scoring.

It was a good, ole fashioned rout.

“We’re allowed to lose a g*dd*mn game once and a while where the other team plays better than us,” Husky head coach Geno Auriemma said. “How about you write that somewhere? South Carolina played way better than Connecticut tonight. That’s allowed to happen once and a while.”

For the Gamecocks (23-1, 10-0 SEC) it gets a pretty big monkey off their back with the program’s first win over a Husky program that has been the head of the class of women’s basketball for the last 20 years.

Staley said after the game she’s proud of her squad for playing the team and not the prestige, never backing down from the moment and clinching a wire-to-wire win.

As the buzzer sounded, it was joy flooding Staley’s thoughts, thinking of all the players she had before this year who never got the chance to take down the behemoth.

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“The time couldn’t tick off quick enough, that’s one. Two, I’m just relieved; not there wasn’t any pressure—there’s pressure to win every single game—but you think about the former players and think about the current players and what it would look like if we lost a game. I didn’t want them to feel that. I didn’t want 18,000 people to feel that. I felt relieved we got it done and it made so many other people happy.”

Now comes the hard part where the Gamecocks have to move on quickly to host Auburn Thursday after such a big win.

“We talked about that in the locker room,” Staley said. “This can’t have any variance on our season moving forward. Whether we won or lost, all of our goals are still in place."